With the increasing popularity of the Internet, the question as to what extent access to information can and should be controlled has become more complicated than ever before. On the one hand, freedom of expression is a necessity of any liberal, democratic society. On the other hand, cyberspace has made it possible for various undesirable groups to project their messages and to target victims without fear of consequence. While critics of Internet regulation often fear unwanted government intrusion into the lives of civilians, few groups dispute that material like pornography or depictions of dehumanizing violence warrant some safeguards.
No group is more at risk from exposure to harmful material via the Internet than children. The combination of the natural curiosity of children, with the almost endless quantity of information in cyberspace, guarantees that some children will, either intentionally or unintentionally, encounter materials that they should not be seeing at a young age.
While children under the age of sixteen currently account for almost 50 percent of the on-line population in the United States, the vast majority of their activities on-line are unsupervised. The nature of the Internet allows a child a fully interactive experience from the “privacy” of home. In addition, at present, many children are more knowledgeable about the Internet than their parents.
Obviously, parental preferences regarding the control of their children's Internet activity varies among parents. Most people agree that regulation of child Internet activity is a right and responsibility of parents in the same way that parents are charged with raising their children in line with their own personal moral and ethical values, as well as those of the society at large.
Children are more vulnerable and less able to apply critical judgment than adults. Therefore parental supervision of some sort has become paramount, but the advent of the Internet poses a great difficulty to such supervision.
Currently there are several methods of parental control for the Internet. The one most well-known and widely used is a blocking system that relies on Ratings or Labels; in which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer an option to prevent underage users from accessing sites of a certain rating. In addition, filtering software systems have also been developed for this purpose.
However, such blocking and filtering systems are not user-friendly, and they are far from being fool-proof. In order to employ blocking, parents must set up separate accounts through the ISP with separate passwords. This creates the difficulties of remembering passwords while hiding them from children. In addition, net-savvy children can figure out ways to gain access to the passwords, or bypass them altogether. Additionally, password systems also suffer from problems of being stolen, forgotten, shared, or intercepted by hackers.
There are many instances where control of access is desirable when carefully balanced between the freedom to be engaged in various activities, and other values beneficial to the individual and/or society, such as safety, privacy, negative influence, education and the freedom to congregate. For example, it is well accepted that adult Internet sites that display pornography should be age-restricted, i.e., forbidden for children to access. Some Internet sites serving the homosexual or lesbian communities may wish to be gender restricted so as to allow only male or female access. Access to public rest-rooms should be gender restricted. Access of children to alcoholic beverage selling businesses, restricted cinema movies, and shows, vending machines offering cigarettes and/or liqueur etc., should be forbidden or controlled. Similarly, access of children to various danger imposing household electronic or electrical devices, such as a stove, should be restricted.
There is thus a widely recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, a method and apparatus for automatically controlling access of an individual to a service, device or location, based on the classification of the individual with respect to a particular category, such as an age and/or gender-category.
Biometric systems are known which identify users using fingerprints, palm prints, retinal identification, face recognition, voice recognition and the like. Such prior art biometric systems, however, generally base the access on a determination of whether the user is identified as a particular individual, rather than as a member of a particular category of individuals. Such prior art systems thus require that each user must have been previously identified, and that the user's identity must have been stored in a data base to be searched when the access is sought. In addition the individual may, over the course of time, change classification category (e.g., grow older so as to be in a different age category), such that a previous recorded identity of an individual would not necessarily indicate the present category of the individual.